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Ear-Openers: New Sounds, No Dogma

The Chicago sextet Herculaneum at Kenny's Castaways.Credit
Willie Davis for The New York Times

At best, Winter Jazzfest is an extraordinary thing. It’s a significant jazz festival, not tied to any cultural institution. And it doesn’t rely on the names that would fill Carnegie Hall or Rose Theater, but on those that make up the music’s daily life, chosen with discernment and advocacy. That’s inspired.

It took the form of about 60 performances (I passed through about a third of them) spread across Friday and Saturday in five rooms on or near Bleecker Street: Le Poisson Rouge, Sullivan Hall, Kenny’s Castaways, Zinc Bar, the Bitter End. Since 2005 Winter Jazzfest has leaned toward new groups, playing new music, and it helps push them into visibility: different audiences — twice as big or more as those groups would usually draw — enacting a different kind of listening, a sorting-out and contextualizing kind.

Photo

The bassist Ben Williams.Credit
Willie Davis for The New York Times

The festival’s organizers, Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz, made two positive innovations this year. They raised minimum pay scales for the bands, and lengthened the time between acts. What good does that do? You’d be surprised: it gives the crowd extra time to dissipate and change. The hope, not always realized, is for everyone to be walking around as much as possible, sampling and moving on.

But I would bet that a lot of listeners — the festival sold out, with around 2,000 each night — were rooted to the spot, as they were probably hearing for the first time the pianist Fabian Almazan’s intense and crystalline trio music, sometimes augmented by a string quartet (a version of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 was a total ear-opener); or the trio of the violinist Mat Maneri, the bassist Shahzad Ismaily and the drummer Ches Smith stamping out free improvisation in an idiom all their own, with abrupt short-order themes; or ERIMAJ, led by the drummer Jamire Williams, a band that dissolves lines between rhythmic traditions in jazz and hip-hop as well as I’ve ever heard; or Herculaneum, a totally unslick, all-for-one sextet from Chicago scrambling aspects of postbop jazz, minimalism, rock dissonance and West African rhythms.

Once you buy a ticket — $35 for a single night, $45 for two — you’re basically on your own. There’s no particular guiding philosophy about jazz on offer, not really even the dogma of no dogma. And this gives the power to the audience, in a way.

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The pianist Fabian Almazan.Credit
Willie Davis for The New York Times

But having one really good experience as a listener at Winter Jazzfest reminds you that you want to see all that you came to see. You don’t want to get marooned in a line or have your view entirely blocked by bottlenecks of people who aren’t really there to listen, packed into a space that’s completely wrong for the occasion. On Friday night around 9, the bouncer at the Zinc Bar, as affably as he could, told those in a large group lined up to hear Miguel Zenón’s quartet that they might have to wait for two hours to enter the club, at which point they’d be waiting for a different band. That’s nonsense.

As for after-the-fact themes or through lines, you might want to think about sounds rather than styles. There were a lot of aggressive or proggy electric guitars: Nels Cline, both with the Nels Cline Singers and with Jenny Scheinman’s Mischief & Mayhem; the semi-metal Jerseyband; Marc Ribot, in his band Ceramic Dog. There were a lot of violins and violas, from the string sections convened by the bandleaders Mr. Almazan, Matt Wilson and Ben Allison to the individual paths cut through the festival by Mr. Maneri (two bands), Ms. Scheinman (four) and Charlie Burnham (two, both great: Michael Blake’s wild, aggressive Hellbent, and Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, which played Sly and the Family Stone repertory as complex, organically interlocking vamps).

Sullivan Hall benefited on Saturday from one more filter of booking. The promotion outfit Revive da Live organized a bill that had style and swing and cultural history — jazz as informed by hip-hop, funk, soul and electric Miles Davis, jazz as 21st-century black music. The lineup included bands led by the drummer Justin Brown, the bassist Ben Williams and the trumpeter Wallace Roney (sounding strong, as did his brother, the tenor saxophonist Antoine Roney); the D.J.’s who played remixed and refracted jazz between acts included Ali Shaheed Muhammad from a Tribe Called Quest.

I can’t stand the corporate branding of cultural festivals, and Winter Jazz Fest seems to agree, at least for now. Sixpoint Craft Ale, one of the festival’s creative collaborators, brewed a special beer for it, Spontaneous Construction Ale, but that’s about as promo-y as things got. At searchandrestore.com, the Web site for Mr. Schatz’s promotional energies, you can see a band playing music in the brewery to “infuse their tanks with the spirit of improvisation.” That’s a crazy idea, and it’s in line with the festival’s thinking about how to connect jazz with audiences in New York: there needs to be more unreasonable optimism, maybe even more magic. They’re working on it.

A version of this review appears in print on January 9, 2012, on page C7 of the New York edition with the headline: Ear-Openers: New Sounds, No Dogma. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe